AR300M16 crashing/rebooting

Routers
1

Hi team.

I have a weird issue with my AR300M16. Ive not been using it for probably a year, and I am about to take a trip so have got it out to check it over. When I first turned it on, it refused to get into any usable state... basically it would become active to a ping for about 3 seconds and then reboot. So, I decided to download the latest uboot image from git, and the latest firmware for the device from the website. I have applied both, so the device should now be running the latest greatest versions.

Now, when I turn the device on, it boots to a green light power (left), and red light wifi (right). At this point I can connect my laptop via cable, and start to set the device up.

At this point I connect the WAN port to my network, and the device crashes. If I disconnect the WAN port, and restart the device, it comes back up again to the previous state after I had just set the thing up.

If I then use the web UI to connect the device to a WiFi network or scan for one, it crashes and I have to go through the same process of restarting the device.

Any ideas as to what is going on? Should I reflash the device again?

3

Is your data cable firmly connected? If the connection is poor, even slight movement may cause the device to reboot.

The latest firmware for the AR300M16 is V4.3.27. You can check and ensure you're using the latest firmware.

4

Im on the latest build available to me, and yeah, the device is being left alone when it is booted, so its not the cable.

As soon as any WiFi activity is done that causes it to crash and restart.

In fact I upgraded to a pure OpenWRT build, and it has the same issue. By default, due to the two nic ports, wifi is disabled. As soon as I enable wifi, it causes the device to restart.

Is this a bad device?

5

We can't rule out potential hardware issues now that the device has been idle for a year.

You could try running logread -f to monitor the system logs in real time and observe the log entries just before the crash occurs when manually enabling WiFi.